Blowing away bloatware: a guide to reinstalling Windows on a new PC

Hate all that crapware on a new PC? Learn how to get rid of it yourself.

Installing Windows (and everything else)

Now that you’ve diligently done all of your prep work, the actual installation of Windows isn’t terribly difficult even if you’ve never done it before. Take the DVD or USB stick you made from the downloaded ISO, put it in (or connect it to) the computer, restart, and then boot from the install media rather than the hard drive—you may have to press a key to invoke the computer's boot menu (usually F12, but it can vary based on your specific machine).

The Windows install process is mostly straightforward, and you'll spend most of your time clicking "Next." The most complicated screen you'll see is the partitioning window, accessible when you elect to do a Custom install (which you should). In lieu of physical install media, most laptops are going to put their Windows restore files (crapware and all) on a separate partition of the hard drive.

Partition schemes like this one, common on new PCs, can reduce the amount of space you can use on your hard drive.

There are two schools of thought here: one contends that you should just format the partition Windows is currently installed to (usually the largest one), preserving the restore partition for future use just in case. The second, which I personally subscribe to, says you should delete all of the existing partitions on the drive and reclaim that hard drive space for your own use. The road you choose to travel depends on how much hard drive space you need and how much of a safety net you want to leave yourself—it should be noted that even if you preserve the existing recovery partition, the Windows installation process can render it nonfunctional. Choose carefully before proceeding.

The computer will install what it needs, reboot, and then boot into the “Out of Box Experience” (OOBE) mode, which helps you set up your user account, enter your product key, and a few other basic things. This is the same process you go through the first time you turn on a new computer. Enter all of your information and you'll eventually reach the Windows desktop—you're back on familiar ground, but you're still a few driver installations away from having a fully functional computer.

Next, get those drivers you downloaded earlier and start installing them—again, I’d start with graphics, network, and sound drivers and then fill in the rest of the gaps. The Device Manager is your friend here—for any device that still needs a driver, you’ll see a question mark under “Unknown devices” along with a vague, sometimes-helpful description of what that item is. Windows also has some generic terms like "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" and "High Definition Audio Device" that it uses when it doesn't quite know what something is.

If you’re still missing drivers post-install, you may have to resort to search engines. Right-click each unidentified device in the Device Manager, click Properties, go to the Details tab, and select Hardware IDs from the Property drop-down menu. You should see a list of a half-dozen or so alphanumeric hardware identifiers that you can plug into your search engine of choice to see what you find. The odds are good that if you can't figure out what something is, someone else has already been there and figured it out for you.

It's not the most streamlined solution, but searching for hardware IDs can be a helpful last resort if you can't find the right driver.

Once you’ve eliminated all the exclamation points in the Device Manager, your computer should be fully operational. Your next step is to connect it to your network and activate it—you can invoke the activation window from the System control panel, or from the system tray icon that will periodically nag you to take care of it.

Because of the SLP process we discussed earlier, the actual license key on the bottom of your computer has probably never actually been activated before—often, I'm able to activate Windows over the Internet without any trouble at all. If you can't do that, you'll have to use Microsoft's phone activation system, which isn't as onerous as it sounds—you just need to call the provided phone number, give Microsoft's automated phone system eight six-digit codes, and then enter the numbers it spits back at you.

Activating Windows 7 over the phone. In total, there will be nine six-digit numbers to give to Microsoft's automated system, which will give you a confirmation ID to type for activation.

You'll never talk to a real person, and the only question you have to answer is "how many computers have been activated with this copy of Windows?" The correct (and truthful, right?) answer is "one"—any other number will kick you out of the system before you get the activation codes you need. It's a boring process, but it only takes about 10 minutes total and you don't have to rely on third-party tools to do it.

Once your drivers are installed and your copy of Windows is activated, you should go to Windows Update and grab all of the many, many updates needed by a fresh load of Windows.

Saving your work

You’ve installed your drivers and applications and you’ve activated and updated your copy of Windows—nice work! You could start using your computer as you normally would at this point, but there’s one last step I’d recommend unless you want to do this all over again from the beginning: you should make a backup image of your computer just in case you ever need to load a fresh copy of Windows on it again.

To preserve your hard work, we'll create a Windows image of your system by going to the Backup and Restore control panel. Click "Create a system image" in the left-hand sidebar, and you'll be able to back up a working copy of your entire Windows installation to an NTFS-formatted external drive, one or more blank DVDs, or (in the Professional and Ultimate editions) a network drive.

Creating a system image will preserve all of your hard work and save you from having to do this again.

Keep the disk or DVDs with this image stored on it intact. If you ever want to go back to your freshly loaded copy of Windows, pop in the Windows install media we burned earlier, and instead of "install now" click "repair your computer."

One button to install, one to run the repair tools. The repair tools will allow you to restore system backup images that you create, run a memory test, and a few other things.

Then click "Restore your computer using a system image that you created earlier" and, when prompted, hook up the external drive or insert the last DVD used in your backup set. Once the tool locates your image, it will restore everything just as it was. This will net you a fresh Windows install without having to start from square one as we did at the beginning of the guide.

This whole process will be made a little easier by Windows 8, which will include command line tools you can use to make system images for use with its new, streamlined Reset and Refresh functions. To talk about that before the operating system is finalized would be to get ahead of ourselves, but you can be sure we’ll talk about it a bit more as the next version of Windows nears release.

Conclusions

Installing a clean copy of Windows by yourself can be a long and arduous process, especially for the uninitiated—after going through this guide, you may well decide that Microsoft’s $99 asking price for its Signature program actually isn’t actually so outrageous after all. What's important to remember is that it's by no means impossible, and the presence of readily available install media and extensive guides like this one means that the process is actually easier (and less legally fraught) than it has been in the past. It's still a bit outside of some users' comfort zones, but anyone with a free Saturday and a do-it-yourself ethos can save that $99 for something else.

Promoted Comments

As for installing software after the OS, I would recommend Ninite instead of doing each install by hand.

It has all the must-have programs and it gives you an installer which automatically installs the latest version of them (without any additional toolbars or crapware) and you can also use the same installer to update the software to the latest version later.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.